8 Genre-Blending Nonfiction Books You Need To Read

If I had to pick a genre for this book, it would be “bikes.” Abraham investigates bikes and bicycles from just about every angle. It’s a blend of memoir, travelogue, history, how-to, and photo journal. It includes maps of memorable rides, snippets of philosophy, instructions for dealing with various bike-related problems, and mini-essays on everything from women’s suffrage to the mechanics of gears. It’s inventive, fun, and, for a book about such a niche topic, surprisingly far-ranging.

This wise and tender book feels like the sort of thing only Kai Cheng Thom could write. She draws on her experiences as an artist, healer, mediator, and community activist to offer an expansive blueprint for living and loving in a broken world. In letters to old friends, ex-lovers, famous transphobes, and past versions of herself, she explores grief, forgiveness, and grace. Interspersed between the letters are short prompts and exercises intended for the reader. It’s a book that can be read in nearly infinite ways: as self-help, as poetry, as memoir, as spiritual teacher, as all of the above.

This is a short book (under 100 pages), and yet somehow, Whitehead packs in about 20 different genres. At times it feels like a mini-biography of his own books and publishing history. At other times, it’s more like an expansive lecture on creative writing. But, it’s also a book about Indigenous language, translation, and storytelling. Blending interview, memoir, photography, collage, and the words of other writers and thinkers, it’s a little book that will leave you with a lot to think about.

When was the last time you really thought about a recipe? Have you ever considered recipes as more than mere lists of instructions — as art forms, epic poems, histories, or archives of personal and collective memory? I guarantee that you will never look at recipes the same way again after reading this book. Johnson explodes the genre of food writing by giving recipes, cookery, and domestic work the rigorous study and attention they deserve. This book is a heady and delicious mix of literary criticism, feminist scholarship, social and cultural critique, personal memoir, and mouthwatering descriptions.

Have you ever had the experience where a book comes highly recommended from several trusted sources, and then you finally read it and it’s even better than they said? That’s what happened to me with this book. It’s the kind of memoir/history/collection of poems/reinvention of storytelling that makes me grateful beyond words to be a reader. Miranda traces her own complicated family history alongside the histories of genocide and colonialism and Indigenous resistance in California. The result is something that breaks open the world.

If you’re looking for a brilliant blend of two distinct genres, this is your book: each essay is a braid of science writing and memoir. Imbler writes about gender, mixed race identity, family history, queer bars, past relationships, and more. But alongside these personal recollections and reflections are gorgeous meditations on sea creatures and phenomena, from jellyfish to Chinese sturgeon to whale falls.

This is a book I will never stop recommending. Like Imbler, Clare stretches and expands nature writing, braiding it together with queer and disability history and scholarship. He blends the academic and the poetic better than just about any other writer I can think of. This is a raw and intimate memoir about surviving trauma and a rigorous study of the interlocking systems of oppression that lead to environmental degradation, sexual violence, and ableism. It’s full of lush descriptions and exacting citations.

A lot of poetry plays with and blends genre, but this book is one of the most innovative and creative collections I’ve read in a long time. In these interconnected poems, Rekdal explores the history of two events that had (and continue to have) massive impacts on the United States: the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The poems themselves are part translation, part retelling of an anonymous poem written on the wall of Angel Island Immigration Station. But, the poems are just the beginning of this remarkable book, which also includes footnote-essays, photographs, and historical documents.